Completion Boost for 2-Year Students Who Take (Some) Online Courses
Susan D’Agostino
September 1, 2022
Black, Hispanic and low-income community college students who take up to half their courses online increase their odds of completing degrees, a working paper finds. Fully online learners are less likely to earn a credential.
A longtime higher ed paradox is this: community colleges open doors to educational opportunities, particularly for underrepresented, low-income or underprepared students, but most students who enter these institutions do not earn degrees. Past studies have produced sometimes-conflicting results on whether online coursework helps community college students progress toward degrees. Many of those studies, however, have not distinguished between students who pursue one or two online classes and those who take all their courses online.
A new working paper from the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida suggests that Black, Hispanic and low-income community college students who take some, but not all, of their courses online increase their likelihood of completing an associate or bachelor’s degree. The online-course-percentage sweet spot for degree completion falls somewhere between “more than zero” but “less than one-quarter.” Also, among all community college students, those who pursued online courses exclusively were less likely to earn associate or bachelor’s degrees than their peers who enrolled in some in-person classes.
